Mad at Washington? What if It Were Gone?

Fallout 3 In a new one-player game, Washington is in ruins and familiar landmarks are gone or shattered.Credit
Bethesda Softworks

At this profound moment in our nation’s history, I’ve spent almost 50 hours recently picking through the rubble of one of its potential futures.

Call it a subconscious yet stubborn refusal to acknowledge the obvious, but it took until the day after the elections for me to make the connection between the two journeys that have captivated me in recent weeks: the road to the White House and my 23rd-century adventures in the post-apocalyptic ruins of Washington, D.C., in Fallout 3.

When I first ventured out of the dank Metro tunnel onto the ravaged National Mall — a snarl of trenches and barbed wire under the shadow of the shattered Washington Monument — I wasn’t thinking about politics. When I sneaked into the ruins of the Capitol and watched a band of mercenaries lob a Mini-Nuke at a raging 30-foot-tall mutant behemoth under the fractured dome of the Rotunda, I wasn’t thinking about filibuster-proof majorities.

Not until I finally battled my way up Pennsylvania Avenue — dispatching mutants with my plasma rifle at every turn to discover only a radioactive crater in the ground behind a twisted, warped yet familiar wrought-iron fence — did I see Fallout 3 in a real-world context. In this vision of the cost of hubris, the White House is not broken or burned. It is not the home of an evil mastermind. It is just gone.

It takes a lot of gumption to blow up the entire Washington area; render the wreckage in detailed yet almost painterly strokes; populate the wasteland with all manner of alternately deranged, endearing and frightening characters; weave a score of intersecting story lines; sprinkle on a thick layer of high-powered weaponry; and simply set the player loose. Yet that is what Bethesda Softworks accomplishes with Fallout 3, one of the most ambitious single-player role-playing games in recent years.

Fallout 3 can be almost intimidating, not in its difficulty (it is almost too easy) but in its scope. At first I basically put blinkers on and studiously ignored everything that was not directly related to the main story. In the game the player begins as a baby, and then picks up as a young adult who has grown up in a locked underground vault with other survivors of the atomic holocaust. You venture into the wasteland in search of your father, who has mysteriously taken off.

The core quest line took me around 25 hours to complete, and I’ve spent 20 more hours exploring but remain squarely aware that I have still seen less than half of everything Fallout 3 has to discover. (As a critic, that is both personally and professionally frustrating but inevitable given the time available.) In terms of sheer volume of content, Fallout 3’s Beltway probably outstrips Grand Theft Auto IV’s rendition of New York City. To call it sprawling would be an understatement.

And that can lead to some discomfort — with the game’s pacing. Fallout 3 does not grab you and throw you into moment after moment of taut excitement. There are plenty of such moments in store, but the player must be at some level self-directed and motivated to seek them out. Some players will enjoy the sense of exploration, but as a dramatic experience it is almost leisurely.

And here Bethesda’s roots show a bit. The revered first two Fallout games were made by a different company, Interplay. Bethesda, perhaps the last major North American developer focused on single-player role playing games (as opposed to online games), is best known for its Elder Scrolls series of fantasy games. I’ve long been a big fan of the Elder Scrolls games, and I have enjoyed Fallout 3, but a bit too much of Bethesda’s earlier work rubbed off on this latest project.

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Here’s what I mean. The great thing about a single-player game is that an entire virtual world can be made to revolve around you, the player. In a single-player game you can become the king or the galactic emperor or the metropolis’s undisputed gang leader or whatever other supreme figure suits the setting because there are no other players for the designer to balance the game for. By contrast, in a multiplayer game you can’t have thousands of kings running around; within the fiction the players have to all be at a less exalted level. (In Lord of the Rings Online you can’t play as Gandalf; instead you are one of many adventurers running missions for Gandalf.)

So what single-player games provide is the opportunity for the player to become all-powerful. And Bethesda traditionally indulges that opportunity. In the Elder Scrolls games it has always been much too easy to become essentially invincible. That is fun for a while, but without challenge the narrative comes to lose meaning.

Fallout 3 does not fall fully into that trap, but it does get an ankle stuck. After a couple dozen hours your character is so powerful that combat ceases to provide any significant challenge and the game basically becomes a sightseeing trip to discover the next bombed-out settlement, underground labyrinth or landmark.

And at that level Fallout 3 delivers. I enjoyed finding a back room in the Capitol strewn with whiskey bottles and shot glasses. I enjoyed searching a lectern and finding a book called “Lying, Congressional Style.”

Call it a cheap gag, but even in the future it still works.

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Mad at Washington? What if It Were Gone?. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe